


No parents, big house

by Multifandom_damnation



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Absent Parents, Child Neglect, Christmas Decorations, Christmas Presents, Developing Friendships, Gen, Past Steve Harrington/Nancy Wheeler, Pre-Season/Series 03, Protective Jim "Chief" Hopper, Steve Harrington Needs a Hug
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-22
Updated: 2019-07-22
Packaged: 2020-07-10 00:14:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19896712
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Multifandom_damnation/pseuds/Multifandom_damnation
Summary: Steve Harrington lives in a huge house all alone and for the life of him, Hopper can't ever remembering seeing his parents.On Christmas, he decides to come to the bottom of why, where he learns more about Steve than he realized there was to know, and realized that everyone deserves to celebrate Christmas with family.(AKA Steve's parents aren't around and Hopper becomes and accidental Santa)





	No parents, big house

**Author's Note:**

> Oh my god, I wish I didn't have to google "does it snow in Indiana" because I'm not from America and originally this fic was written in summer, but then I remembered AMERICA HAS SNOW AT CHRISTMAS AND THEY'ER NOT MELTING AT 40 DEGREES.
> 
> ALSO, MORE IMPORTANTLY, this fic is dedicated to @Shainira on YouTube who made this amazing video that i've been watching for a week and inspired this fic. You can watch this masterpiece here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0Z9Ovl3tHk . I hope you don't mind me writing this, but I loved it so much, and if you ever see this and don't like it, I can change the name or take it down if you'd like.
> 
> This fic is centered around Christmas but is NOT a Christmas fic. I hope you enjoy, let me know what you think and how many things I got horribly wrong.

For reasons nobody could understand, Steve Harrington, the most popular kid in the school, lived in a house too big for a normal family to live in, all alone.

Hopper had lived in Hawkins all his life, so a very long time, and been the Chief of Police for almost as long. He had never seen Steve with any parents. Never seen him dropped off at school or prom or friends’ houses. Never seen him back a bag and go with them on one of their many holidays abroad.

Once, Nancy had told him all about the parties Steve used to throw in his house that was big enough to fit his whole year level in with ease and the pool they would lounge at and smoke under the stars while other kids got drunk off their assess inside. How he would spend the whole next day and most of the night cleaning up the mess of a bunch of drunken teenagers ruining his parent's immaculate house, just in case his parents came home early and seen what Steve had done to the place in their absence.

Steve used to just be that lost kid who hung around with bullies who made him act like a dick just to fit in so he could get out of the solitude of his family home, and sometimes he did things he wasn’t supposed to do in the darkness of back allies just so he could _feel something,_ and sometimes Hopper would call him up on it, but rarely, and he only ever left with a warning. He felt sorry for the kid.

Maybe that was why instead of hanging around kids his own age and growing up with new friends from new places, he spent all his time driving around a bunch of kids with a baseball bat full of nails and a determination to keep them safe, even if that meant putting himself into the face of danger and possible death. And Hopper didn’t know him too well despite basically watching him grow up, but he knew that Steve would jump in front of any of the kids regardless of any threat if it meant keeping them safe.

Maybe it had something to do with the empty house that he only spent time in, to sleep and smoke and a drink himself into a stupor until the sun came up, just because he could and there was nobody home to tell him otherwise.

Or maybe it had something to do with all the order in his life, and how free he must have felt without it.

Hopper didn’t trust kids who had nobody to rein them in. Nobody to pull them up on their crap. Nobody to tell them when they’re doing wrong, being wrong, hurting people. And he knew that Steve had done a hell of a lot of hurting and just as much getting hurt, and most of it he deserved. But sometimes he didn’t. Sometimes, he didn’t deserve it, and just wished that he did, and sometimes, he made himself deserve it, just to give him a reason.

But unlike some of the other's that Hopper knew lived in Hawkins, Steve was a good kid with a kind soul who just wanted to help where he could.

So maybe that was why Hopper found himself standing on Steve’s front door-step in a stupid Christmas sweater-vest-jacket-thing that Joyce had made him wear in his heavy snow boots and sunglasses. For no reason other than to return the favour he wasn’t particularly sure he owed.

Despite nobody being home, the house was decorated to perfection. There was a wreath on the front door and Christmas lights shone cheerily through the windows, all a bright white, and if Hopper pressed his face to the glass, he would see the inside decorated just as well. He brought his hand up to the door and knocked and waited, slightly impatiently, for Steve to open the door.

It was always possible that Steve wasn’t home. He could have been driving the kids anywhere they wanted to go, because that’s just the type of man Steve was now, or he could have been buying them snacks and drinks and things too old for them just because they begged him for it, but then Steve was opening the door, pulling a shirt over his head with one hand, pink-faced and a little out of breath. “Oh- Chief.” He sounded a little confused and Hopper couldn’t blame him. “Sorry, I was by the pool. Almost didn’t hear you- don’t worry, come in.”

“By the pool?” Hopper frowned as he accepted the invitation and wiped his shoes on the doormat. “Steve, it’s _snowing_.”

Steve shrugged. “It’s a heated pool.”

There were so many ways that Hopper wanted to argue that point but changed his mind. Steve led him further into the house, and Hopper was a little surprised to see how immaculate it was, considering Steve was the only one to live there. The floors were mopped, the single-coloured Christmas lights lined the windows, the fake tree was decorated with specifically picked out baubles and tinsel that matched the rest of the décor, and everything somehow seemed so ordered and precise that Hopper was a little shocked. “This place is… nice. Very clean.”

“Yeah, my mum leaves me instructions when she and dad go away on what she wants to be done and how she wants the house to look. I know every cleaning product in our cupboard off by heart,” Steve pushed his hair out of his face. “Anyway, you want a beer? Or a smoke?”

Hopper glanced out the window. “You do know that it’s about 11 a.m., right?”

Scoffing, Steve swatted at the air as he walked away. “You’re not on duty.”

Unable to argue with that, Hopper let Steve wander off to fetch him a beer and took the opportunity to look around the rest of the place.

In the kitchen, used fast-food wrappers and popsicle sticks and empty beer cans stacked up in the rubbish bin under the sink, and the stove looked like it had hardly been used. The fridge too wasn’t full of many things, and none of them healthy, but it had all of the things Steve enjoyed and things his parents probably didn’t usually let him have. There were dirty dishes in the sink.

The walls were all pretty much bare, no pictures or memories of Steve’s childhood, no important moments in his life. The only personalised object in the room was an intricately decorated photo frame that held a picture of Steve’s parent’s wedding day. Even the tree was decorated in silver and white and blue. There were no handmade kindergarten projects that Steve had made for them, no little knickknacks that proved that anybody actually lived there. Only the dirty dishes in the sink that said a teenage boy couldn’t be bothered doing them and didn’t have anyone around to make him.

Probably the only good thing about his parents being away was that Steve could leave his weapons lying around and no one would tell him off or be suspicious. Hopper spotted at least two large baseball bats studded through with sharp, gruesome-looking nails.

Before Hopper could pry any further, Steve returned, holding the neck of two beer bottles in one hand and a packet of smokes in the other. He threw the cigarettes onto the kitchen counter and pulled his lighter from his pocket, handing Hopper one of the beers. “Take what you want,” he said easily as he leant over the counter. “I’ve got plenty.”

Taking a mental note of the way Steve said _‘I’ve’_ , Hopper took the beer from Steve’s hand. “Do you really think your parents want their house stinking of smoke?” He asked as he popped the top off the bottle.

“You think my parents are around enough to know what smoke smells like?” Steve laughed, opening the packet and pulling out a few, tossing them across the counter so they rolled towards Hopper. “Nah, I’ve become an expert at only smoking inside when I know they wouldn’t be around to notice, even days or weeks later. This is one of those times. Or, it can be, if you want.”

“Right,” Hopper said as he took a sip from his beer. He wasn’t about to call up the fact that Steve wasn’t allowed to be drinking, but it was a new law, and as Steve said- he wasn’t on duty. He also just wasn’t that type of cop. “Where are your parents, anyhow?”

Steve seemed to falter. “Oh, uh, just on one of their business trips.” The way Steve said business trips made Hopper think that it was more of a holiday than anything else. “You know how it is.”

Hopper smiled thinly as Steve picked up one of the cigarettes and lit it. “Right,” he didn’t, not really. “Uh, Dustin said you’ve been spending more time together. How do you think you'll hold up when he goes away to camp?”

For the first time, there was a spark of excitement in Steve’s eyes, and Hopper couldn’t help but notice that he was happier talking about a 13-year-old than he was about his parents. “Oh man, it’s going to suck all kinds of balls, but I’ll find a way to survive it, I guess. If the guys let me, I might be able to borrow their radio and talk to him. I hear he's bringing one.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Hopper smiled. “I can’t wait to see what kind of nonsense you two get into when he gets back.”

When Dustin had first told him about his unlikely friendship with his once-bully Steve Harrington, Hopper honestly hadn’t believed it and had told him as much. Almost laughed in his face. Steve Harrington? Friends? Those words just didn’t fit together, especially not with a 13-year-old.

But now, Hopper was convinced that their friendship was the best thing to ever happen to either of them. He didn’t know Steve too well, but he knew Dustin like he knew the Dungeons and Dragons manual, which was to say, not perfectly, but more than he would have liked. And if what Dustin had been telling him was true, then a lot of the reason that he was alive and happy was all because of Steve being by his side when nobody else was.

It was a bit of a shock to Hopper when he found out that Dustin was ditching his friends for _Steve,_ but soon enough, it became more than a little obvious that Dustin hadn’t had a choice. All his friends were growing up now, dating girls and spending nights in a lip-lock and even Will had more on his plate than usual, but Dustin had only wanted to have fun and kill monsters and mess about in junkyards. So, of course, he was forced to choose Steve.

Besides- it’s common knowledge that you couldn’t play D&D with only two people.

Dustin had also told Hopper about how much time they spent hanging out at Steve’s house, because his parents were never around to tell them not to, and how lonely Steve was when he wasn’t hanging out with Dustin and the kids. Maybe that was another reason Hopper was here. “I uh, I heard that you were looking for a job?”

“Oh, yeah,” Steve said, jumping up onto the counter. Hopper knew that if he was his child, he would have told him off by now. “I heard Scoops Ahoy is hiring- the new ice-cream place at the mall. I’m thinking about trying there. I mean, what have I got to lose, you know?”

Hopper laughed lightly as he scooped up a cigarette from the counter and lit it with the lighter that Steve held out to him. “That’s a good way of thinking about it.” He just couldn’t help it- Hopper glanced around the room again. “Uh, this place is pretty… impersonal. I mean, there aren’t any pictures up on the walls, the Christmas tree looks like it was decorated straight out of a magazine and everything is just so… immaculate. It's nice, but you’d hardly know that a family of three even lived here if it weren’t for you coming in and out.”

A look of sadness crossed Steve’s face and Hopper immediately regretted his words. “Yeah, my mum likes everything to be perfect. She’s always been this way. When I was a kid, she didn’t even put any of my drawings up on the fridge because she didn’t want the kitchen to look messy. I’ve made about a thousand Christmas decorations since I was four, but once I gave them to her, I never saw them again. Same goes with presents too, for birthdays and stuff.”

“What did she do with it?” Hopper frowned.

Steve shrugged. “Probably put them in the bin. I’ve lived in this house all my life, and I’ve been into every nook and cranny, and I’ve never seen them. I mean, I can’t blame her. They were probably pretty ugly.”

It took a moment to process. Hopper couldn’t imagine ever throwing out one of his daughter’s drawings or gifts or creations. He still had a folder full of Sara’s kindergarten artworks in his room, and El’s art was on his fridge as she learnt about the joy of colouring. “Wow,” was all he could say. “That’s… wow. Why would she do that?” Probably not the best thing to say, but he was impulsive.

“I guess she just wants a nice home. They’ve always had the money for it, but I think she wanted the inside to look just as expensive and professional as the outside.” Steve said. “It’s no good having a huge heated pool if nobody knows about it. They liked having people over, but the house had to be perfect. Their parties were nothing like my parties if you know what I mean.”

“Sure,” Hopper tried not to laugh, because he was a cop, and that wasn’t supposed to be funny. “And your dad? Did he ever throw your trophies away to make sure his study was perfect?”

Taking a considerate sip from his drink, Steve thought for a moment before answering. “Nah, nothing like that. Just the stereotypical dad stuff. He always thought I was a loser and was so shocked and he found out that I was the most popular kid in school, then tried to prove that I had paid people to like me. Because apparently, I’m just a jackass to everyone.” Hopper didn’t mention that he _was_ a jackass to everyone. “He always thought I was stupid and that I would never get into college, which is partially why I’m not looking- because I don’t want to give him the satisfaction of seeing the rejection letter. He was always so critical of my test scores, and if I didn’t get the number he wanted, he was disappointed. I always hated making him disappointed in me, so eventually, I just stopped coming home with my assignments. I’d put them in a bin on the way home.”

Hopper could never imagine ever doing that, or even accepting that a child would do that, and it burned him deep inside knowing that Steve had. “That’s… not stereotypical dad stuff, Steve.”

“Oh,” Steve seemed to pause for a moment. “Well, it’s _my_ dad’s stereotypical stuff, I guess.” 

“Right,” Hopper said. “I uh… I don’t think I’ve ever seen your parents. You should all come over for thanksgiving sometime, with me and El. There’s plenty of room, and I cook a mean turkey.”

Steve took a long drag of his cigarette and let the smoke fester in his lungs for a moment before blowing it out where it circled the ceiling. “You know; I would love to but my parents uh… my family doesn’t usually celebrate thanksgiving. They’re not normally here around that time of the year, anyway. They’ve got a lot going on.”

Pursing his lips, Hopper nodded slowly, his grip tightening on his bottle. “Uh-huh. ‘Business trips’. So you told me.”

Not able to meet Hopper’s eyes, Steve looked down at the counter and the half-empty beer in his hand. “Yeah, business trips.”

There was a familiar fury bubbling up inside Hopper and the longer he thought about it, the more he hated Steve’s parents. Steve wasn’t the best or brightest of kids and sometimes he could be a selfish prick, but he was kind and genuine and self-sacrificing when it counted, and he took care of the kids when nobody else would. He didn’t deserve the cards his parents had dealt him.

Placing his beer bottle on the counter, Hopper gripped his cigarette between his teeth before announcing, “I’ll be right back,” to a very confused Steve and walking out the front door.

It was just as cold outside now as it was when Hopper originally entered the estate, and he stood by the front door while he finished his cigarette and made his way through the snow to his car. He put it out on the ashtray so Steve’s parents didn’t see it when they came home and snatched up the carefully wrapped package from the backseat. El had helped him with it after his first failed attempts resulted in a lot of yelling. It had Steve’s name scrawled on it in El’s careful, slightly childish handwriting.

Why was Jim Hopper giving Steve Harrington a Christmas gift? Hopper didn’t know why either, but all he knew was that he didn’t regret it for a moment and realized that maybe Steve needed it more than ever. More than Hopper had anticipated.

The blast of warm air that hit him in the face was welcome when Hopper walked back to the kitchen. Steve had already cleaned up, put out his cigarette in an ashtray that Hopper hadn’t seen before and placed the empty beer bottles in the corner for him to dispose of later. Hopper could tell he was about to make some snarky, witty joke, but he shoved the present into his hands before he could utter a sound. “This is from El. And me. Merry Christmas.”

Steve looked like Hopper had just handed him a live bomb. “You- this is a- why would you…?”

“You are always welcome at my house, Harrington,” Hopper said, shuffling his feet uncomfortably on the floor. He wasn’t good with _feelings_. “Screw your parents. In my eyes, you’re still a kid, and you still deserve to celebrate the holidays with family. Come to the cabin for Christmas. Spend it with me and El and anyone else who wants to join us, but don't spend it locked away here all alone.”

“Chief-” Steve was choking in his words. “I don’t know what to say… why did you…”

Hopper held a hand up and Steve fell silent. “You don’t have to open it now just to appease me- you can even wait and open it on Christmas morning if you want to. But just know that you have a family who cares about you, even if it’s not your blood. You know where to find us when you need us.” Hopper reached out and ruffled Steve’s hair before he could object. “Happy holidays, kid.”

He was gone and out the door again before Steve had time to process what had just happened, and over the rumble of his engine roaring to life, Hopper could hear Steve’s childish giggling from inside the house, and his childlike face peering out at Hoppers car through the window.

Satisfied and proud of himself, Hopper drove away down the street back to the cabin to make sure El hadn’t burned the house down and to tell her to prepare for one more guest on Christmas Day.


End file.
